In the City by the Lake

by Taylor Saracen

  I was concentrating on walking up the steps, one at a time, when I heard crying. I worried it was me, but a quick sweep of my cheeks ensured it wasn’t. Lifting my head, I saw Cal holding Rosie, the mousy little moll buried into my guy’s body. I was so hungry and so starved for Cal’s attention. I wanted Rosie to disappear, go back to New York so he would stop inhaling my air. I was over him. I was over my patience.

  “I was raped,” Rosie wailed.

  And suddenly, I was well on my way to sober.

  16

  February 1934

  The night of Rosie’s incident, my initial reaction was to have no reaction at all. I sat at the head of the bed, back wedged into the corner of the room, eyes staring into space as we rang in the New Year listening to Rosie’s tearful telling of the assault. I tried not to look at him. I could barely look at him when he wasn’t crying and seeing him sob was disturbing. It was as though the well of sadness I had always recognized in him had begun to surge from his pores, flooding the room with the depth of his emotions. I don’t know if I had ever been more uncomfortable in my life. Cal, however, naturally moved into a nurturing role. While it had been obvious he had a tenderness toward Rosie, it was strange to witness the purity of their connection. Cal seemed fatherly in a way I hadn’t expected. Cradling his arms around Rosie’s lithe figure, Cal rocked and hushed him with soothing coos. I felt as though I was witnessing something I shouldn’t, a part of Cal I hadn’t needed to see. It was an image that would stay with me and one I would have preferred to forget. The rawness reverberated in my mind, sending hot waves of nausea through my body, yet I wasn’t sure if I was troubled or disgusted by Rosie’s recounting.

  I had been around drag queens for years, but none of them affected me in the visceral way Rosie did. While other performers played up the theatrics, Rosie was stripped down, authentically himself while not being himself at all. It was unnerving. I could not understand how a body and the person inhabiting it could be two different entities, perpetually traveling away from one another while struggling to remain whole. Watching Cal attempt to pick up the pieces of a man who had been broken since birth felt eerily familiar, a similarity I didn’t want to face. Did people feel my sadness as I felt Rosie’s, or was I only able to tune in to him because I had spent my life being melancholy too? I hated him for being weak when I always had to be strong.

  Rosie had asked Cal if he could sleep on the floor beside his bed that night, too terrified to go back into the main room where the act had taken place. When Cal told him he could, I knew it was the end of our evening. There was no way in hell I was going to lay with a man while another man was in the room, though I was sure Rosie knew the nature of our relationship. Reluctantly, I made my way home, my stomach growling for the meal I hadn’t eaten.

  As the weeks passed, Rosie became a permanent fixture in Cal’s room, one with the floorboards. The subsequent lack of alone time with Cal left me cranky, a disposition made worse by the number of accounts I’d lost since prohibition ended. Once I’d sobered, a few other owners had shown me the same consideration Abraham did, but the five parlors I held were nothing compared to the twelve that used to be on my ledger. As if I weren’t concerned enough about my livelihood, Cal’s desire to approach Abe about what had happened to Rosie added another level of stress. I had never imagined I would be desperate for Abraham and Cal to remain on good terms, but it was very apparent that my ability to make a minute amount of money was entwined with their ability to get along. If the alleged attacker had been anyone but Abe’s most recent muse, I would not have been so tentative, but the contributing factors seemed a clear indication that reporting what had happened to the club owner wasn’t the best idea.

  I had no doubt Abraham would think the same as I did when I had heard Rosie’s account, if only due to the terminology of the allegation. Rosie could not have been raped because he wasn’t a female. Rape was a crime against women, and though Rosie wanted to be a girl, wanting didn’t sprout him a vagina. It was crass, but it was the truth. At best, Rosie could accuse Abe’s new companion of sodomizing him, but it would be a tough sell considering the illicit line of work in which Rosie participated. Though Cal believed Rosie’s situation was a gray area, I assured him it was his rose-colored lenses making it so. Worse than the ethical implications of our discussion was the potential fallout for each of us. Getting on Abraham’s bad side would most likely result in Cal and Rosie being forced out of The Studio, and I could not imagine him taking kindly to the allegation. From what I understood of Cal’s moonshine manufacturing, it was a small endeavor, not lucrative enough to pay for a room elsewhere and as much as I would have liked to, I could not offer him a place to stay. Rosie would no doubt face prejudice in an apartment search, and it was unlikely he would find a place to take him in. The best they would be able to do was get in line behind the hundreds of people waiting for shelter beds. What had happened to Rosie was awful. Even considering the violation sent chills down my spine, but that didn’t mean I was impulsive enough to threaten stability when the city around me was breathing erratically. It wasn’t the time to cross our fingers and hope for the best. We needed to be thankful for what we had and not bite the hand that kept us fed.

  Somehow, Cal didn’t worry about the logistics of life. He was feather-light, swept across the grass by the wind. Over the years it had become increasingly obvious that Cal hadn’t had the misfortune of coping with poverty. His parents’ farm was lucrative, and though he didn’t live off their tit, his charismatic attitude and good looks had kept him in the black while other men, men like me, would have been seeing red. Money didn’t need to be important to someone who had always found a way to have it, but Cal didn’t know an economy like the one we were contending with. None of us did.

  “This isn’t about money,” Cal retorted as we continued to delve deep into the same discussion we had been having for over a month. “This is about right and wrong, dignity, some sort of justice for Rosie.”

  “Everything’s about money. You can’t live on right or wrong. They’re starry-eyed ideals that don’t exist here. Look around, people are destitute. Dignity doesn’t keep them warm on the streets. You have to have something in your pocket.”

  “You know what I have in my pocket,” he flirted.

  I licked the smile off my lips and laid my head on his lap, loving the way he played with my hair. With Rosie around so often, there hadn’t been enough moments like those, where we could be together without the weight of the world sitting on our shoulders. I looked forward to times I knew the chorus moll would be working in the alley, hating that I had to steal moments that had been so easily accessed before.

  “Tell me one of your stories, Huckleberry,” I urged, wanting a moment away from the bushwa to listen to Cal, hanging onto his every word as he filled in the missing moments in his life.

  “Why do you care about my silly stories?” he laughed, pretending to be modest when I knew he was anything but.

  “You know why” I answered, not willing to say more.

  “I’ve told you about my time in New Orleans, haven’t I?”

  “Only that you went there before you came here.”

  I sat up only for Cal to pull me down so our heads were lying on his pillow, faces turned toward each other. His arms were long, but he managed to hold me close, making me pliant in his embrace. It had taken a while for acts of affection to feel comfortable, as if a lifetime of not being touched had made my body rigid, and as it loosened, it allowed me to finally take a new form. His.

  “I got there in August of 1928, a year after the flood.”

  “How was that?”

  “Everything was a mess,” Cal replied, tracing his finger pad over my jawbone. “Most of the black folks who had been in refugee camps in the lowlands had either committed to making their lives there or had started to move north.”

  “So, who did you meet?” I asked, knowing his stories always centered upon a character who wasn’t him.

&n
bsp; “André LeBas.”

  I despised the dreamy look he had in his eyes as the creole name rolled off his tongue. Had Cal touched him the way he touched me? Had he made André feel like his was the only face he sought to memorize?

  Cal continued to speak, which assured me I’d done an adequate job of concealing my jealousy. “He’d been in a camp for six months before he got to New Orleans. The things he told me about the camp.” Cal shook his head as though he was recalling a memory he’d never had. “They didn’t have food or clean water.”

  “You won’t either if you mess things up with Abe.”

  “You’re always ready to run through any opening I give you, aren’t you?” Cal tsked. I could tell he was amused, regardless of how aggravated he attempted to appear.

  I nodded. “You can’t say I don’t have talent.”

  “You have lots of talents,” he crooned, kissing me, slow and sultry. I was sure he wasn’t alluding to my ability to speed read.

  As my cheeks burned, I interlaced our fingers. I wished our minds and bodies could fit together like held hands, completely enmeshed with one another, leaving no space for air, no room for doubt. I had never cared to keep anything the way I coveted him. It was overwhelming, especially when I considered that one day I would be forced to let him go. Nothing lasted forever, especially in the tempestuous world we lived in. To think we would perpetually remain while everything changed was insane, but goddamn I wished I was crazy enough to believe it.

  “No quip?” he asked, nudging his nose against mine.

  Grinning at the playful gesture, I held him tighter, petitioning a greater power to make me an idiot and wondering if they already had.

  “Back to André,” he said. “You’ll get a kick out of this one, I know you will. He was a saxophonist who played in this negro jazz band. I forget what they called themselves, but you would have loved their music, they had a Louis Armstrong feel.”

  “Sounds like they were good.”

  “Very,” Cal nodded. “They played Congo Square often, and I met André after one of their performances. We got to talking, and I found out he was planning to go Chicago too.”

  “Weren’t all the blacks planning to come to Chicago?”

  “A lot of them,” Cal confirmed. “Shit wasn’t good for them in the South, especially in the refugee camps. They were treated like dogs, and Hoover didn’t do anything to make it better.”

  “Wait.” I screwed my eyebrows down. “Hoover didn’t do anything?”

  Cal laughed. “Can you believe it?”

  “Here I thought he was an effective President,” I joked.

  “Sorry to pull the wool from your eyes.”

  “I’ll survive.”

  “Good,” he chuckled. “So, André and I spent a good amount of time together. We went to jazz clubs and art galleries. He was interesting. His life was so different from mine. I liked learning new things, especially things that changed my life completely.”

  “That’s a big statement,” I noted, secretly seething with jealousy. I could confidently say Cal had changed my life, but I doubted I’d had a similar impact on him.

  “I had a lot of lower back pain at the time from picking tobacco. André suggested I go with him to a Voodoo queen he saw for his ailments.”

  “This took a turn I wasn’t expecting” I admitted. “Did you go?”

  “Oh yes. She mixed me a Hoodoo ‘cure-all.’ It was a mix of jimson weed, sulfur and honey.”

  “That sounds disgusting.”

  “It was really awful,” he assured. “She put it in a glass, rubbed it against a black cat, and then had me sip it slowly.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “She rubbed the glass against a black cat?”

  He nodded.

  “And did it work?”

  “Have I ever complained about my back?” he grinned.

  “Wow,” I said, impressed that the potion had worked for him. “I need a Hoodoo cure-all. I want to sip it and forget everything’s fucked.”

  “I thought you relied on booze for that?” he teased, tickling my side.

  “You’re a regular Buster Keaton,” I laughed.

  “She mixed me a Hoodoo drink to enhance my cleverness,” Cal smirked. “As you can see, it worked. I thought about staying in New Orleans, close to my Voodoo queen and never worrying a day in my life.

  “You worry so little anyway,” I reminded.

  “I worry more than you know.”

  “Why do I not know?”

  “Why would you want to?” Cal asked, pushing my shoulder down to the mattress, prepared to give me his version of a cure-all.

  We both worried less, at least for a little while.

  17

  April 1934

  I had never been anything other than myself, not due to excessive pride, but more because I found it unnecessary to identify my qualifying parts when I found their sum insufferable enough. Perhaps I would have related to people better if I had settled into a category: the fairy, the Jew, the Russian. I was so much and so little at the same time. I preferred not to focus on being anything other than alive, and at times not even that. Though I hadn’t pulled apart my strands, I could not avoid the pangs of discomfort I experienced when a piece of me was under attack. The moment Adolf Hitler banned art produced by Jews, I was a Jew, vulnerable to religious persecution and repressed. As soon as I read news of the Soviet Republic’s decree imposing three to five years in prison for those convicted of homosexuality, I was homosexual and an enemy of a country I hadn’t lived in for nearly two decades. I was everything I didn't want to be, seeing how the world thought there was so much wrong with me. Perhaps that’s why, against my better judgement, I had allowed Cal to become my world. He saw me differently than everyone else and made me feel like every fucked-up inch of me was the way it was supposed to be. It was the first time I had ever been fully accepted by anyone and it was more powerful than I’d anticipated, allowing me to get entangled in emotions that hadn’t existed before him. It was the reason supporting Cal as best I could became a given instead of a question.

  Despite my advice, I had known it was only a matter of time until Cal went to Abraham about Rosie’s assault. I was surprised he’d had the capacity to hold out until early March, though there was no significance in the delay. I would have much preferred if Cal had expedited the whole thing rather than leave me with the smallest sliver of hope that I was wrong about the inevitability of his actions. Anticipating the worst could be worse than the worst was, but in the circumstance of Cal, Rosie and Abe, I had no doubt the anticipation and outcome would be equally matched in their unpleasantness. Sadly, I was correct. Not only had Abe gotten defensive about the allegation, undoubtedly not allowing himself to believe his new man would want to be with a person like Rosie, he’d also become irritated that Cal had felt compelled to bring the lie to his attention. According to Cal, when he insisted it was the truth, Abraham retorted that even if it was, ‘Rosie is not a beacon of virtue. He’s a whore who gets paid to provide pleasure to men.’ That was when Cal told me he’d lost his patience and shouted that ‘it wasn’t a transaction.” Much to Cal’s dismay, Abe then offered to give Rosie a few dollars to compensate for the alleged attack, hoping to settle the ordeal amiably. When Cal told him that Rosie didn’t feel safe in The Studio any longer, Abe said: ‘Then he is welcome to find somewhere else to stay.’

  To say Cal was seething when he recounted the conversation would have been a massive understatement. He was livid in a way only a man possessed by his anger could be. I was tentative to ask how he had replied, aware that whatever enraged statement Cal had made was the punctuation on their otherwise peachy relationship.

  “I don’t remember exactly,” Cal stated. “I blacked out in rage. I think it was something along the lines of ‘I can’t believe I ever spent time with you’ and ‘we’ll both be finding a new place to live.’”

  “And do you have any idea of where that will be?” I asked. Any of this could’ve
been chalked up to his impulsive nature if it weren’t something he’d tiptoed around for months.

  “You know the answer to that,” Cal had replied, sheepishly.

  That was all it took for me to vow to help him: a slight bashfulness in his tone. In the past, it could have been André, Abraham or some other asshole looking out for him. I knew I wasn’t the first, but I wanted to be the last.

  It didn’t take long for him to line up an apartment. One of the men who had gotten a taste for Cal’s moonshine owned a three-story complex in Streetersville and offered Cal and Rosie a two bedroom on the third floor for fifteen dollars a month. The place was bare and in disrepair, but it came with two battered sofas, a chair, several pots, and a mattress in each room. The catch, other than the obvious—the place was a shithole that wasn’t worth a dime—was that the landlord wanted six months of fees upfront, a cost too steep for Cal’s wallet. Though it dipped deep into my savings, I fronted the money. It was the first year I couldn’t use extra cash to attend Cubs games, but they hadn’t been doing well over the last few years anyway, falling into a pattern of third place finishes. Cal was my World Series, and I was intent on winning.

  While the apartment wasn’t much, Cal was happy with it, so it seemed I was coming out ahead even if the competition was all in my mind. I spent a lot of time there and Cal had been attempting to persuade me to move in for weeks, but I couldn’t do it, too flummoxed by what lie I would have to tell my family. It wasn’t as though they didn’t realize I had someone I spent time with—I was gone enough to make that obvious—it was more that I’d been able to keep them under the illusion it wasn’t serious. Luckily, they were all too busy with their own companions to question much. I had a feeling my father would be solidifying things with waitress Sally soon enough, and when he did, I would be out. It wouldn’t raise a single eyebrow if I looked for another place to live when he moved the floozy in. She was a motherly type and I had spent twenty-eight years without a doting mom. The manner in which she tried to endear herself to Igor and me was disingenuous in the worst possible way. Ig wasn’t as impacted as I was, mostly because Millie told him not to be. She liked Sally and that was enough for my spineless sibling. “Mikhailovs didn’t need women” until they needed their fucking lives micromanaged by females. It was a sad state of events to witness my brethren being emasculated. They would judge me for being with a man, but at least I went toe to toe with Cal as equals rather than becoming a whipping boy for a woman. Shit, I couldn’t understand how anyone would want to be with a dame. There was nothing appealing about their displaced fat pads and feminine curves. If it would not have drawn suspicion, I would have asked Igor and Maks what it was they saw in the fairer sex, what it was about broads that impelled them to hand over their balls in a basket.